


Growing Up Snowmen

by IShipItAllAndThenSome



Category: Atomic Blonde (2017), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Bisexual Lorraine Broughton, Bisexual Minerva McGonagall, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Dancing, Emotional Support, F/F, F/M, Fix-it fic, Love, Magical Realism, Memory, WLW Solidarity, Young Minerva McGonagall, platonic intimacy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-26
Updated: 2017-09-26
Packaged: 2019-01-05 16:25:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12193467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IShipItAllAndThenSome/pseuds/IShipItAllAndThenSome
Summary: This war has been slow like cold honey, like cancer, like driftwood burning. Sweetness, peace, warmth - take them when you can and leave them where they can be found again. Or: Minerva McGonagall and Lorraine Broughton could have met.





	Growing Up Snowmen

Three inches under the ice, Lorraine is not breathing.

When she comes up, there is a snowman dancing on the lip of the tub, and Minerva is spread-eagled on the bathroom floor, humming softly, bottle and glasses perched behind her head. 

Lorraine gasps coming out, ice clacking softly, and takes her drink, watching snow shuffle. Fingers dripping and ever-so-slightly blue, she plucks Minerva’s spectacles from her face and puts them on. 

“So this is how you see things,” she murmurs, imitating her brogue to a tee.

“Yes, it is.” Minerva’s a gifted mimic.

Lorraine tosses back her vodka and sinks back under the ice.

 

☃

 

They are both the sort of narrow-boned women who can hide in smoke and silk and angular things. Put them somewhere with two mirrors and you will see three.

Of course, for Minerva, that isn’t metaphor, but Lorraine appreciates that. Even in all her fantasy, she’s quite frank.

_Bang. Bang._

An agent tumbles back, kneecaps bleeding, just as a bolt of light catches another in the gut and he goes entirely stiff, falling forward and sliding over rubble like a plastic saucer sled on concrete.

“That’s better,” the witch says, arresting his descent with the flick of her wrist. 

Lorraine throws a punch, square enough, but her sprained wrist aches too deeply to keep at 90◦, so she’ll be feeling that for weeks. She tries to shake the twang out, but there isn’t time for that, and she rams her elbow into someone else’s throat while she does it so as not to make waste. 

Minerva jams the heel of her boot into his kidney, again and again until he drops, and kicks the nerve along the top of his shoulder, knocking him out cold. Then she grabs Lorraine’s arm with shocking tenderness, with the blood icing over in the air, and murmurs, _“Ossio dispersimus.”_

The ache disappears, and she tuts.

“Must you Americans always break things?” 

“I’m British.”

“Of course.” Minerva’s eyes flash. “My mistake.”

 

☃

 

This is how things go: sometimes, Communists cast spells. Sometimes, wizards don’t just go Dark, they go Red. 

Sometimes, tied back to back, one will fish a weapon or a wand from the other’s inner thigh; other times, Lorraine will snap a neck to give Minerva time to cast a particularly complex incantation, or Minerva will make Lorraine bulletproof in the split second before gunfire deafens them both.

Their mission files are always marked _Cat And Mouse_ , and neither has ever been quite sure who is whom.

 

☃

 

This Belarusian hotel glows with old curses and new radiation - at least, to Minerva’s trained and enchanted eyes - but she’s quick enough with protection spells to save them both a tumor.

Minerva has stopped offering to heal her bruises. She is covered in a patina of sick, cold hues, pale yellow and queasy plum the warmest among them, and she soaks herself in ice from the machine in the far corner of their floor, sipping Stoli from waxy paper cups barely big enough for a single oblong cube. So the ache dulls.

 _I need to remember,_ Lorraine says. _It keeps me smart._

 _Fight smarter_ , Minerva replies, _not harder_.

She understands, though. She took three bullets to the back in Albania on their last coincidental mission, two years ago in ’67. Lorraine turned twenty watching Minerva summon bullets out of skin half an inch from her spine, wondering if her blood had power, or if she only worked in one piece.

 _Some assembly required_ , Minerva said, stretching into the split skin. 

 _Batteries irreplaceable,_ was Lorraine’s retort. She wrapped Minerva’s torso in gauze, fingers hesitant in their softness over the three sanguine points connecting rib to waist to hip. _Is it batteries?_

_I’m a wind-up toy._

Her eyes are the bottoms of bottles of burgundy, round and green and sharp and frangible.

_Watch me go._

They go.

They go to war, they go to sleep, they go to bed. They go together.

 

☃

 

Lorraine clings to asceticism in the strangest of ways. She gives herself the plushest angora wool coats in a veritable rainbow, Italian leather boots with solid silver chains, diamond rings designed to shred skin and clean easy, but she has no personal tastes beside her drink, common enough in her line of work. 

She doesn’t like any kind of music, any particular food. The soap in her apartment, when she’s off duty long enough to have one, is devoid of scent, or it’s the remnants of the hotel freebie she had last. She has no hobbies. No favorite color.

Once, she may have hummed along to Steppenwolf or The Majorettes, squirreled away money for extra butter on her popcorn at the movies or the drugstore knockoff of Love’s Baby Soft, crushed peonies behind her ears and made drippy jam sandwiches. Maybe she stargazed or did puzzles or read Sylvia Plath.

She probably liked blue. Most people do - it’s the most common favorite color. Lorraine thinks about being common. Standard. Ordinary.

Minerva touches her hair, sticky with blood, and says, _dearest, you are ordinary now - the bell curve peak of the human experience._  

Minerva always knows just what to say.

 

☃

 

“A girl whose hair is yellower than/ fresh torchlight should wear no/ headdress other than fresh flowers.”

“I am not a girl.”

Lorraine is a bruise, head t0 toe, forget-me-nots blooming all over her body.

“No,” Minerva muses, touching her split lip with a tender thumb. “You are not.”

 

☃

 

Minerva knits her grey fingerless gloves that promise to help cushion her bones in harder blows, speed the reaction time in her trigger finger. They’re lumpy, but they smooth out to boutique perfection once they’re on Lorraine’s hands. 

She does needlepoint, too; sometimes, it’s sticky with aqueous humor from some idiot who tried to break into her hotel room, and she embroiders kittens that play with the tail of the thread with Lorraine’s head in her lap.

Lorraine asks, all the questions you’re supposed to ask.

Apparently, Minerva likes jazz and doo-wop and sweeping choral arrangements; she likes Battenburg cake, and drop scones with lemon curd and strawberry jam, and fried hake with enough vinegar to choke a Clydesdale; a boy in her hometown makes soap with sloe and heather, and she’s always loved the smell but can never get it right on her own. She reads, does needlepoint, handles hopeless schoolchild drama when she’s not saving the wizarding world from a nuclear apocalypse. 

Her favorite colors are red, green, and gold, because why pick just one?

 

☃

 

Both of them have a boy. Had a boy.

Minerva’s is now a husband and father. He is happy without her, as she knew he would be, and that’s exactly why she left him behind. She misses the lather of his soap and the chime of his laugh, and sometimes she wishes she’d stayed. It’s never enough to truly regret the choice, because her choice was the right one, and it’s the one she will always make. 

Lorraine’s has hands as bloody and dirty and shaky and scarred as her own. He looks soft in a way she can never manage. She’s always the image of a shark; he is always a starfish. He will heal, every time; she will get out before she is hurt too badly and she will always smell blood in the water. 

 

☃

 

There is a castle on a cliff near Minerva’s home. It overlooks the grey surf and the grey sky and in a blizzard, everything is as flat a white as a new tooth. 

When she was a child, she used to read at the foot of the crumbling stone parapet, reciting sonnets to the sea. She would climb down, dive down, float down, and light bonfires that glowed saltwater violet. Come winter, come that eyetooth blizzard, she would allow herself to be buried alive by her brothers. At school, she’d enchant snowmen to dance.

Lorraine remembers dancing, sometimes. Lorraine remembers snowmen. She remembers biting noses on her tiptoes and she remembers target practice, clipping off six inches with the six bullets in a clip. She remembers when cold didn’t feel bad.

 

☃

 

They dance together. Lorraine, broader, taller, lets Minerva lead precisely half the time. 

_Mama says there’ll be days like this, there’ll be days like this, my Mama says…_

Lorraine’s chin hooks over Minerva’s shoulder, careful of her cracked clavicle, and sways. 

_Mama says! Mama says!_

 

☃

 

Within this war, there are many others. 

Minerva’s soft places ossify with the bones of her dead. Lorraine walls her heart in with miles of broken leaded glass. 

They are grooves worn into each other from frantic pacing and bruising kisses and bone-check hugs. They are determined, like cockroaches, to outlast mutually assured destruction. They did not consent to being consumed.

 

☃

 

Minerva wonders aloud, throat working into Lorraine’s forehead, if the war will ever end.

Lorraine is such a liar she isn’t certain if she means the _no_ she gives.

That’s what scares her.

 

☃

 

“Can you put breath back into someone’s lungs?” Lorraine asks. “Once it’s been squeezed out.”

“No.”

 

☃

 

Their wars have ended.

Lorraine finds photographs - of herself, of Berlin, of Delphine - in an envelope in an owl’s beak. They are moving. Delphine’s throat is unmarred. 

“So this is how you see things.”

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this, like, a week ago or something, probably longer because time isn't real and I don't know what's going on with my life, and I didn't post it because I wrote it the same day a chapter of Under The Same Sun was going up and didn't want it to be a whole thing. Today, I said Fuck It, because I need to get back into my McGonagall fic and wanted to pull a half-assed Galbraith. 
> 
> Please let me know what you thought in the comments; thank you for reading.


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